Aearo

White owls lurked in the snow, and Ielgar knew it, so when the innkeeper threatened to throw him out, he resolved to behave. He put his mug down and glared back and forth at the empty barstools that extended on either side of him. His long ears twitched.

The innkeeper was an old mouse with poorly-oiled joints and a dented faceplate. He cast suspicious glances at Ielgar when he thought the other mouse wasn't looking. Ielgar deserved those glances. He'd been hitting the other patrons with a wrought-iron staff whenever they tried to sit near him. Now that they'd stopped trying, he merely sat slouched, and glowered. He drank slowly, pausing to wait for an oily film with a rainbow sheen to form on the surface of the drink, then slurping it off the top of the liquid before returning the mug to the bar top. This irritated the innkeeper almost as much as Ielgar's earlier unruly behavior, but as much as he wanted to, he couldn't throw the mouse out for not finishing his drink quickly enough. Secretly, he hoped that Ielgar would hit a patron with his staff one more time so that he'd have an excuse for getting rid of him. Ielgar wore a heavy furred cloak over his spindly aluminum carapace and kept the hood pulled down low. Under his cloak, Ielgar was not a pretty mouse. His face was thin and angular, and his body was narrow, compact and dull. In contrast to the rest of his body, his ears were very wide and long, which indicated that his internal components needed an unusually large amount of cooling, but the cooling fans ran in near-perfect silence. His eyes glowed golden, glinting strangely off the planes of his angular faceplate. They dimly illuminated the inside of his hood. The staff was shaped like an oversized fire poker or a single post from an iron fence. The other mice found it to be somewhat grotesque, particularly the ones who were themselves made of iron. "Are you going to finish that?" the innkeeper raspily asked. Ielgar slurped another layer of film off the top of his drink before answering. "Maybe," he said. "I'm not going to stay open all night," said the innkeeper. Ielgar remembered the owls. "A room for the night," he said. "What?" "Give me one." He idly stirred the beverage with a long, spindly aluminum finger. The innkeeper twitched. "What?" he asked again. "A room for the night," repeated Ielgar. "Give me one." "No," said the innkeeper, flatly. "Then I don't have much incentive to finish the drink, do I?" Ielgar removed his finger from the drink, opened his mouth wide, and stuck his hand into his gaping maw. He let the liquid drip slowly off his finger into the back of his throat. "I'm not sure I follow," said the innkeeper. Ielgar continued to let the beverage drip into his mouth. It landed somewhere deep inside him, where it went plink, plink, plink. The innkeeper folded his arms and waited impatiently for Ielgar to finish. Finally, Ielgar said, "if I can't have a room, then I'll no doubt have to leave when I finish my drink. It is late, and there are owls abroad. Therefore, it makes sense for me to finish my drink as slowly as possible." He went back to stirring the drink with a finger. "I'll throw you out anyway," said the innkeeper. "I'm closing soon. You'll have to face them, drink or no, and the longer you wait, the darker and colder it will be." Ielgar shrugged. "Life is a constant postponement of the inevitable." He once more let the liquid drip from his finger into his throat. "You keep doing that," said the innkeeper, "and I'll throw you out anyway." "You really want word to get out that you'd kick a paying customer into the snow before he'd even finished his drink? You'd be out of business in three seconds." "Or," growled the innkeeper, "I'll drag you in back, tear you apart and feed your remains to the vats, and the next batch of unruly customers would be dripping you from their fingers into their throats." "Empty threat," said Ielgar, simply - and of course it was. The innkeeper shot him one last nasty look, and moved to serve the other customers, of which there were few. Ielgar went back to letting his drink congeal. "Also," he added softly as the innkeeper stepped back just into hearing range, "if you give me a room, I won't tell the king's men about that little pet of yours." The innkeeper's eyes flashed in alarm, casting mug-shaped shadows against the wooden wall. He spun to face Ielgar. "You'd better tell me how you know about that," he said, "but if a room for the night is the price to buy your silence, then so be it."

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Just a little thing I wrote a few months ago and just now expanded upon. Don't judge it too harshly, it hasn't gotten much revision.